66 POULTRY. 



Allured by the syren hiss and quack of some seductive voicej sweetly 

 sibillating, in dulcet notes, 



" Oh Goosey, goosey Gander, 

 Whither do you wander V 



Stoops down to earth and 



" Stamps an image of himself, 

 A sovereign of a frog pond !" — Dryden varied! 



But our love-striken gander was not without high precedent and 

 classic example in his amorous dallying with a daughter of earth. 

 Great Jove the Thunderer himself, the Greek Mythologists tell us, 

 assumed the shape of a swan, and descended to earth to greet fair 

 Leda, 



" Sparta's beauteous Queen." 



Hear what poor old Jack Falstaff says, in the " Merry Wives of 

 Windsor," 



" powerful lore !— you once, Jupiter, were a swan for the love of Leda ! O 

 omnipotent love ! How near the god drew to the complexion of a goose ! Think 

 on't, Jove ! a fault in the semblance of a fowl ! a foul fault !" 



Now every school boy, not wholly oblivious of his Horace, knows 

 that this same Leda, after this visit, laid a couple of splendid eggs^ 

 from which were hatched those splendid fellows, Castor and Pollux, re- 

 doubtable knock-down heroes in their time, and now fixed in constel- 

 lation among the starry host. And if these things were so, and who 

 dare say they were not so, against the august authority of Hesiod and 

 Homer and Horace and Ovid and Jack Falstaif, who can blame an 

 honest, simple-hearted gander for taking the great god for a leader, 

 when the great god himself had a Leda (leader ?} of his own fol- 

 lowing ? 



But leaving the delightful and seductive fields of classic lore, let 

 us proceed with our Report, — and the Committee award 



To W. Cutler, of Andover, seventy-five cents, for his White Tur- 

 keys, beautiful birds, indeed, and well worthy a higher premium, if 

 the Committee had it to give. Fair, fat and full-breasted were they, 

 and eminently suggestive of Thanksgiving Day and all its delightful 

 associations ; New England's time-honored festival, plum-pudding 

 and the gathering of loved ones about the homestead hearth ; 

 pumpkin pie and the reunion of fond hearts and cranberry tarts ; — 

 long, long may it endure, and the Governor's Proclamation never 

 fail! 



